Posts Tagged ‘National Enquirer’

I wrote about this when the evidence of the affair was already way beyond overwhelming, back when John Edwards was caught visiting Rielle Hunter in a hotel room in the wee hours of the morning.

Up until recently, John Edwards has refused to comment on a National Enquirer story that’s been unfolding for over a year. Asked about it on Thursday at an event in New Orleans, Edwards pompously sniffed: “I have no idea what you’re asking about. I’ve responded, consistently, to these tabloid allegations by saying I don’t respond to these lies and you know that … and I stand by that.”

Democrat strategist Lanny Davis somehow managed to climb up onto his gigantic moral high horse yesterday long enough to chide Fox News for covering the scandal (“It’s a private matter, blah blah blah.”). But where was this guy when Republican politicians were getting nailed? It would have been nice if you could have shown up on that high horse of yours then, Lan.

Okay, so John’s wife Elizabeth has been diagnosed with terminal, incurable cancer, and the guy that was very nearly our Vice President responded by getting busy with some homewrecker that filmed the pretty boy.

Now, it is something that such a major Democrat player is revealed to be a slimeball and a soulless liar. You’ve got major liberal donors (e.g. Fred Baron) showing their willingness to financially bail out a creep in the act of being a creep; you’ve got money games being played, with the mistress and the Edwards staff campaign fall guy (Andrew Young) being moved to mansions to keep the lie going; you’ve got a Democrat candidate for president and vice president cynically cashing out on the loyalty of those around him.

But the bigger deal about this story is the fact that a slimy tabloid rag is demonstrated to be morally superior to not only this top Democrat, but the major news organizations as well.

The National Enquirer‘s Barry Levine was on Geraldo Rivera’s Fox News program on Saturday pointing out that the Enquirer had “left a lot of bread crumbs way back in October” for the mainstream media, and that during the campaign for the Democratic nomination “all the time the mainstream press is following [Edwards] around, this affair was happening right under their noses.”

The New York Times hasn’t deigned to cover the Edwards scandal, even when it became blatantly obvious. But these ideologues didn’t have a any problem whatsoever literally creating an affair out of scratch to tarnish Republican John McCain. The title of the story itself – “For McCain, Self-Confidence on Ethics Poses Its Own Risk” – shows just how out to destroy McCain’s character The New York Times was. And there was no basis for this innuendo hearsay story at all.

And The Los Angeles Times not only refused to run a story in their own backyard when it reflected poorly on a Democrat, but they even went to the lengths of trying to cover up the story in their blog.

The Enquirer has had a whole bunch of ammo last year on this, but the elite media – not wanting to damage a top Democrat during the campaign season – put “the cone of silence” over the story, ala Maxwell Smart. Their silence about Edwards didn’t stop The New York Times from running a pseudo-story broadside about a manufactured John McCain affair.

We told you about Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick getting out of jail Friday. Thursday, when the Associated Press reported that he had been imprisoned for violating terms of his bond in his perjury case, the AP failed to mention his party affiliation. Kilpatrick is a Democrat.

But back on July 29, when Alaska Senator Ted Stevens was indicted, the AP made his party affiliation clear. The headline read, “Ted Stevens indicted, longest-serving GOP senator.” The article included the word “Republican” seven times and “GOP” four times.

Media watchdog Web site NewsBusters.org reports that both “ABC World News” and “NBC Nightly News” also failed to report Kilpatrick’s party affiliation.

It’s a shame. If you want politically neutral news, don’t turn to The New York Times, or The Los Angeles Times, or the Associated Press, or ABC, or NBC. Way too often they can only be counted on to try to help Democrats and hurt Republicans. Nope. If you want honest coverage, you’ve got to turn to the people that run stories about alien abductions, paparazzi trash, and half-dog, half-human babies.

The funny thing is that, even as major media are now forced to cover the Edwards story (due to prurient interests), they are covering it on very different terms from their coverage of Republican sex scandals. I constantly see the question, “Should we be covering this story? Is it good for society? How is it relevant?” When such questions never occupy the debate in covering Republican scandals. Let me just put it this way: if Sen. Larry Craig in a restroom is a story, then former Sen., V.P. candidate, and Presidential candidate John Edwards in a hotel room is a story as well. Yet we find the media in hand-wringing introspection over the latter when it seemed only to exult in the former.

John Edwards certainly ought to be ashamed. But the press should be hanging their heads as well.

There’s little “apparently” about it: The National Enquirer has run stories that John Edwards had a “love child” with a woman named Rielle Hunter. The story begins:

Vice Presidential candidate Sen. John Edwards was caught visiting his mistress and secret love child at 2:40 this morning in a Los Angeles hotel by the NATIONAL ENQUIRER.

The married ex-senator from North Carolina – whose wife Elizabeth continues to battle cancer — met with his mistress, blonde divorcée Rielle Hunter, at the Beverly Hilton on Monday night, July 21 – and the NATIONAL ENQUIRER was there! He didn’t leave until early the next morning.

Rielle had driven to Los Angeles from Santa Barbara with a male friend for the rendezvous with Edwards. The former senator attended a press event Monday afternoon with L.A. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa on the topic of how to combat homelessness.

But a months-long NATIONAL ENQUIRER investigation had yielded information that Rielle and Edwards, 54, had arranged to secretly meet afterward and for the ex-senator to spend some time with both his mistress and the love child who he refuses to publicly acknowledge as his own.

John Edwards was in Los Angeles to do one of his poverty events, and the Enquirer discovered that Rielle Hunter had a room at the Beverly Hilton. Believing that John Edwards – whom their sources claimed was the father of Hunter’s child in December 2007 story – would show up, an Enquirer team obtained a room and laid in wait for the former Senator.

Sure enough he showed up. And when the Enquirer reporters began to photograph him and ask him questions at 2:40 A.M., Edwards – who did not have a room at the hotel he was in at nearly 3 A.M. – ran into a bathroom and called security.

So let’s just come out and acknowledge the plain fact: John Edwards is a philandering lech who had a long-time sexual affair even as his wife is possibly dying of cancer.

Okay. For many who have long-since come to believe that John Edwards was a scumbag par excellance, this isn’t so much news as it is confirmation of what they already thought.

LAT Gags Blogs: In a move that has apparently stirred up some internal discontent, the Los Angeles Times has banned its bloggers, including political bloggers, from mentioning the Edwards/Rielle Hunter story. Even bloggers who want to mention the story in order to make a skeptical we-don’t-trust-the-Enquirer point are forbidden from doing so. Kausfiles has obtained a copy of the email Times bloggers received from editor Tony Pierce. [I’ve excised the recipient list and omitted Pierce’s email address]:

From: “Pierce, Tony”

Date:July 24, 2008 10:54:41 AM PDT

To: [XXX]

Subject: john edwards

Hey bloggers,

There has been a little buzz surrounding John Edwards and his alleged affair. Because the only source has been the National Enquirer we have decided not to cover the rumors or salacious speculations. So I am asking you all not to blog about this topic until further notified.

If you have any questions or are ever in need of story ideas that would best fit your blog, please don’t hesitate to ask

Keep rockin,

Tony

That will certainly calm paranoia about the Mainstream Media (MSM) suppressing the Edwards scandal. …

P.S.: Is the Times’ edict a) part of a double-standard that favors Democrats (and disfavors Republicans like Rep. Vito Fossella and John McCain)? Or does it b) simply reflect an outmoded Gatekeeper Model of journalism in which not informing readers of certain sensitive allegations is as important as informing them–as if readers are too simple-minded to weigh charges that are not proven, as if they aren’t going to find out about such controversies anyway? I’d say it’s a mixture of both (a) and (b). This was a sensational scandal the LAT and other MSM papers passionately did not want to uncover when Edwards was a formal candidate, and now that the Enquirer seems to have done the job for them it looks like they want everyone to shut up while they fail to uncover it again. …

There are so many reasons to know that the media is WAY, WAY, WAAAAAYYY in the tank for Democrats.

You can add that to the massive media entourage – including all three elite network anchors – that accompanied Barack Obama on his foreign trip.

You remember the “wide-stance” airport bathroom arrest of Republican Senator Larry Craig? The media were all over that story after it surfaced, and had been trying to get dirt on him for months. Though he ultimately refused to resign, the constant media attention destroyed his career, and he is not running for re-election.

You remember the media frenzy over the Repulbican Representative Mark Foley scandal in Florida? It may have been the straw-that-broke-the-camel’s-back moment for Republicans in the 2006 elections. The media couldn’t get enough of that one. And as much as they covered the scandal, they misrepresented it to make it sound worse than it actually was. One had to work to learn the truth that the media didn’t reveal: that Foley was not molesting boys, but rather forming friendships with congressional pages, and then contacting them with sexual advances AFTER they were of legal age. He did not solicit sex with any active page. He has never been arrested for his conduct since his resignation.

Neither of these men had anywhere NEAR the public profile of two-time Democratic candidate for president and 2004 vice-presidential candidate Edwards. But it didn’t matter to a media that was out to destroy Republicans and influence elections. The media ignored the Edwards “love-child” story for months and months when they went after Republicans with zeal.

Now, I don’t mind one bit that the media exposed guys like Craig and Foley. What they did – legal or not – was wrong, and they should have been exposed.

What bothers me is the constant double-standard of a media that represents itself as being objective while it is clearly in the tank for liberals and Democrats.

On story after story, issue after issue, the media reveals its bias. It reveals it in the stories it covers, the stories that it refuses to cover, the people it interviews or refuses to interview for a given story, and the angle or topic of a story that is covered versus other possible angles. They do it all the time, unrelentingly.

Many liberals believe as they do because they have been made stupid by a media that routinely distorts the truth and misrepresents the facts. They cannot understand reality because they are constantly presented with a lie.

As much of a story as two-time Democrat candidate for president John Edward’s infidelity is, the real story is the bias of the media in refusing to fairly and objectively cover a story that would negatively effect Democrats.